Regional Music

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From Andean to zydeco, pick your flavor and there's a summer music festival ready to serve it up. Whether classical, jazz, pop, or folk, 'tis the season to get out and enjoy the music By CLEA SIMON | June 18, 2010

Only a day before the Massachusetts Senate showed its true colors by approving a set of anti-immigrant amendments to the state budget — a recent change of heart that would probably not have happened had it not been for the so-called Arizona effect — the Yo No Tengo Huevos Dept. By MARCELA GARCIA | June 04, 2010

As if it weren’t enough that the venerable Paramount Theatre on Washington Street was open for the first time since 1976, the Celebrity Series of Boston brought in as the initial act to play the new 600-seat mainstage Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester. Max Raabe & Palast Orchester, live at the Paramount Theatre, March 6, 2010 By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 12, 2010

Alejandro Franov is an Argentine multi-instrumentalist who's been involved in the more serious, and often experimental, side of the Buenos Aires music scene since he was a teen in the late 1980s. Nature Bliss (2010) By GUSTAVO TURNER | March 05, 2010

Sharing a bill, a backing band, and the cramped stage of the Brattle Theatre last Friday, two Swedish singer-songwriters turned it up to the world-music equivalent of 11 for an audience that, for the most part, refused to dance. El Perro Del Mar and Taken by Trees, live at the Brattle Theatre, February 19, 2010 By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | February 26, 2010

Hankus Netsky founded the Klezmer Conservatory Band 30 years ago at New England Conservatory and sparked an American klezmer revival that continues to this day. The KCB's main man talks Klezmer By JON GARELICK | February 26, 2010

The Romantic notion of artistic merit is that one must plumb the depths of despair to emerge with great work — and that the finest triumphs are often born of the direst misery. Ladysmith Black Mambazo raise their voices By DANIEL BROCKMAN | February 05, 2010

If great art and great artists are supposed to contain multitudes, then in music, at least, pianists have the edge: 10 fingers theoretically capable of 10 different simultaneous paths for the music to take. Of course, it's not that simple. Nando Michelin and Matt Steckler know who they are By JON GARELICK | January 29, 2010

Girl-group records are great and everything, yet the countless compilations out there were becoming a little hit-or-miss until 2005, when the great Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found box set finally gave this diverse genre a proper taxonomy. Domino (2009) By JONATHAN DONALDSON | December 18, 2009

Riddle this: what's more unlikely than the fact that the current toast of Broadway is a musical about a Nigerian agitprop pop singer, or that it owes its existence to a Caucasian commodities trader from New England? Boston and Broadway By CHRIS FARAONE | December 11, 2009

The most substantial item in the assortment of dances by the Trey McIntyre Project last weekend was an oddly proportioned 20-minute meditation on climate change and Glacier National Park. McIntyre, whose company appeared at the ICA as part of the CRASH Trey McIntyre at the ICA By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | November 27, 2009

If you purchase a copy of Soundway’s wonderful Panama! 3 — and you should — you get two things for the price of one. First, this is a carefully curated CD of “Calypso Panameño, Guajira Jazz & Cumbia Típica on the Isthmus 1960-75” that will keep you Soundway (2009) By GUSTAVO TURNER | November 27, 2009

Film noir has been a running theme in composer/pianist Ran Blake's work since the beginning of his career — his very first album, The Newest Sound Around (RCA, 1962), with singer Jeanne Lee, began with David Raskin's theme to Otto Preminger's Laura . Ran Blake's Pawnbroker, Sofia Koutsovitis's pan-American roots By JON GARELICK | November 20, 2009

It’s a chilly Monday afternoon, and at the head of the lawn in front of the Christian Science Center, Zili Misik are starting soundcheck, bear-hugging their instruments to keep them warm. The educational ecstasy of Zili Misik By MATT PARISH | October 23, 2009

Yes, this Boston jazz trio incorporates the sounds of seals, tree frogs, and crickets. Yes, one of them is a working ecologist. Here's why you shouldn't hold that against them. Earthsound is for real By JON GARELICK | September 25, 2009

Yes, this Boston jazz trio incorporates the sounds of seals, tree frogs, and crickets. Yes, one of them is a working ecologist. Here's why you shouldn't hold that against them. Earthsound is for real By JON GARELICK | September 25, 2009

I keep finding good, inexpensive food in Boston in unlikely places: a commercial shipyard, a construction-company lot, a mall food court, and what looks like someone's house in a residential neighborhood. A place to dance, drink, and maybe get a little Puerto Rican nosh By MC SLIM JB | July 31, 2009

On record, Femi Kuti can't help but come off as a slightly vanilla version of his mad genius father Fela (popularizer of Afrobeat music, also known for having 12 wives at once, among other things). And Luke Kalloch By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | July 17, 2009

King Sunny Adé's music is bubbly as a tonic — a percolating, pop-infused update of the traditional Yoruba sound. "My songs are made to lift worries, so people can be happy and dance their troubles away," declares the 62-year-old Nigerian world-music sta King Sunny Adé still brings the beats By TED DROZDOWSKI | July 10, 2009

Last year's Boston French Film Festival featured Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two , and that, combined with this year's Chris Marker retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive and Agnès Varda's fine new The Beaches of Agnès , made it seem almost plau The new-wavers at the French Film Festival By PETER KEOUGH | July 03, 2009

The best summer music festivals take something from the season: the smell of the surf, the sight of the mountains, fireworks, lawn seating — or, at least, fried dough. Music al fresco at summer fests By CLEA SIMON | June 12, 2009

Over the past year, Honest Jon's has released three compilations culled from more than 150,000 78s of early music from the EMI Hayes Archive: music from 1930s Baghdad, early West African music recorded in Britain, and a more general compilation that mo Honest Jon's (2009) By DEVIN KING | May 08, 2009